species
Conservation Redemption
10/08/08 08:09
Although I am an agnostic in fine standing today, I am certainly betraying my childhood as a Protestant and a man bound to the U.S. South when I use the word redemption — one of the signal ideas in the European Protestant tradition. This is the prodigal son, the slaver who was once lost but has now been found, the sheep who has returned to the flock and her relieved shepherd. It’s the second chance, with hope rekindled and fanned into open flame. The language of redemption drives many of us in conservation. Most of us seem daily aware that this point in history is special, pregnant with special losses and opportunities. Some of us in more extreme forms see the outlines of Armageddon and apocalpyse — an end of what we have known and the press of imminent and ultimate battle — but that’s not my personal sense of time. I am more keen to see struggle, even if manichean in form. That struggle has largely seen defeats for “our” side. But the victories are notable too. Read More...
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NEWS: streaming freshwater adaptation talk
24/06/08 19:50
A symposium from the Western Division of the American Fisheries Society focused on climate change and bull trout has been posted online for live streaming. Read More...
Wetlands in the Air
25/05/08 16:09
A study late last week suggested that atmospheric methane emissions are way up. This is disturbing on a number of levels that should have a lot of people very worried. Read More...
The Romance of Conservation
06/04/08 10:42
A lot of people have a romantic vision of the life of a conservation biologist, certainly for those who do fieldwork in exotic places. Perhaps I still share this vision, at least occasionally. But one reader of the first three entries here called and said, Your site is very depressing. I assume he meant it wasn’t romantic and charming.
He’s right, of course. Even by the root of the term, “conservation” is about a stopping loss, an attempt to keep from losing too much and about holding on to some notion of what’s “left” in a place -- an attempt to keep a place from passing from threatened to a state of crisis, or from a crisis to something even worse. Read More...
He’s right, of course. Even by the root of the term, “conservation” is about a stopping loss, an attempt to keep from losing too much and about holding on to some notion of what’s “left” in a place -- an attempt to keep a place from passing from threatened to a state of crisis, or from a crisis to something even worse. Read More...
